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Reply Regarding Laura

To Giacomo Colonna

Please not, only the following paragrph regarding Laura is available. This one paragraph does not represent the entre letter.

"What in the world do you say? That I invented the splendid name of Laura so that it might not only something for me to speak about but occasion to have others speak of me; that indeed there was no Laura on my mind except perhaps the poetic one for which I have aspired as is attested by my long and untiring studies. And finally you say that the truly live Laura by whose beauty I seem to be captured was completely invented, my poems fictitious and my sighs feigned. I wish indeed that you wer jokeing about this particular subject, and that she indeed had been a fiction and not a madness ... This wound will heal in time and that Ciceronian saying will apply to me: 'Time wounds, and time heals,' and against this fictitious Laura as you call it, that other fiction of mine, Augustine, will perhaps be of help."

Translated by Aldo S. Bernardo. State University of New York Press: Albany, New York. 1975. P. 102.

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